Ultimate Category Excluder 0.8

7 July 2011, 11:30 am

Ultimate Category Excluder has been upgraded to version 0.8. You may download Ultimate Category Excluder from WordPress.org. The only change made was a new feature, which has been frequently asked for, to allow all categories to appear on the list of categories able to be excluded, even those categories which don’t have any posts yet.

Let me know of any problems you discover.

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11 Comments

This plugin is great. I have a specific usage scenario that i was hoping you could help me with, if possible. I’m using the “Organize Series” plugin that groups several posts together into one, so i can get a solid foundation going to create articles spanned over more than one page (WP default just using numbers is horrible for this and my use).

So if i have 4 pages grouped to a series, i obviously want pages 1-3 to be visually excluded from every possible place on the site, just like your plugin provides. The problem here is as soon as I “exclude from mainpage” the series plugin can’t grab the pages anymore.

I think the solution could be a simple one, but i was hoping you had some ideas.

WordPress has a very limited method for creating articles over several pages, and if your plugin can support “organize Series”, it would be a huge saviour for those who need a good solution.

Hi James, I just looked over the Organize Series plugin. That’s a pretty cool plugin. I’ll need to keep that in mind for the future.

Hmmm, regarding your problem. You only want articles 1-3 to appear on your “Series page.” Are those 4 posts all in the same category? Are they the only posts in that category? If so, the solution might be along the lines of a new function or a tiny plugin to tweak the display.

Another thought: If you only want those 4 posts to show up on the “Series” page, why not simply combine the posts all together once they are written? The advantage of a “series” is that people can come into the middle of it (via search engine or from your RSS feed). Once the series is complete, just put them all together on one page or post. No need for the “organize series” plugin at all.

Hi Mike. I’ll try to explain it all out. Let’s say i want to write a review, and i want to break down the information in it over, say, 5 pages. I’d want a proper nav bar at the bottom, named, and possibly a drop down menu, like this: (http://www.anandtech.com/show/5541/amd-radeon-hd-7750-radeon-hd-7770-ghz-edition-review/23#comments) – just scroll a little above to see it. In WordPress it just can’t be done with the “–Nextpage–” shortcode, it will just give a list of pages, like 1, 2 ,3 ,4 – it’s ugly for this purpose, I’ve tried many ideas to get a good page menu, but none work well. The best solution i have found (outside of a proper plugin solution for posts over several pages) is Organize Series + hide the extra pages from the entire site. When i found your plugin i thought I’d cracked it!

So if my review had 5 pages, the last 4 pages would be part of page 1, it would not be separate information or posts that should ever be read or listed separately on the site. This means i must hide pages 1 through 4 from the entire site, which your plugin does very well, but as noted, it then hides it from the series plugins post navigation. I’m not sure how much you tested the OSeries plugin, but it puts in page named “previous” and “next” page links at the bottom, and a table of contents. The plugin can no longer pull or find those extra pages, so it only lists the first page.

The thing is, i am using a heavily modded theme, and part of the original theme had an option to hide categories from the homepage, and if i enabled this, it would still work in Organize Series, so a softer technique for hiding from the front page must exist (i can also say that it wouldn’t hide it from widgets, only the actual front page), as it had a different result to your plugin. The problem with just using this method on my theme is two things:

1) it doesn’t hide the posts from archives or feeds.
2) your plugin breaks the themes method, so I can’t currently combine the two to get my desired result.

If this all still sounds confusing, I can always email you (or you email me) and I can interject pics to show the problem, would be far easier.

But the basic problem I’m facing is that while your method to hide from the front page is definitely the most efficient method, it is too aggressive for my needs, so if there was a way to choose the aggressive method and the softer method, it would be exceptional for my needs.

You are correct, that plugin would have been ideal, but sadly it’s unsupported now and has some major coding issues, so I’m having to jump through hoops just to get named pages on a post (or at least make it look like that’s the case for the readers).

I’m syndicating a couple feeds via RSS, and wish to exclude them from going back out via my own RSS, eNews through feedburner. I’ve installed Ultimate Category Excluder, activated, NOT checked ANY content from exclusion and all but a few categories no longer appear in the featured content areas on the home page.

Hmm, that’s an odd error you describe. Does the problem still occur when you change to using the regular Twenty Ten or Twenty Eleven themes that come with WordPress? How about when you disable the “Genesis – Featured Widget Amplified” plugin? What version of WP (3.42 it appears), MySQL and PHP is your site running? Send me a direct note if you don’t want to post that info publicly. Mike

I’d guess that if the problem is caused by something in the theme or your other plugin(s), it will affect any plugin you use that tries to exclude posts from appearing in different places. If you switch to 2010 or 2011, and activating UCE still causes problems, then we’re probably looking at a bug in my plugin. Unfortunately I can’t easily debug problems like yours since I don’t have the same development environment. Mike